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The Outrageous Hypocrisy of the Media
This morning I was nearly spitting teeth when I saw the main editorial from the Editorial Board of the Orlando Sentinel. (We subscribe only to the Sunday paper which entitles us to the weekly e-newspaper; I like their puzzles page.) The title was “Election Day 2020: A Referendum on Truth.” It was an attack on President Trump.
Seriously?
Yes, it was an editorial. It focused only on “Trump’s Lies” during his administration. It listed several sources of information, like their colleagues at the Washington Post and the New York Times.
I decided to write to the Sentinel and share my thoughts:
I know that it’s old news to discredit the media for lying—your deceptions are legion.
There are the lies you told about the Russia conspiracy, promoting lies by Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, The Squad, Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein, John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey. How about all the lies you perpetuated by not discrediting years of FBI misdeeds, Obama’s abuses of power, and gleefully misrepresenting the current President’s words? How about your protecting Joe Biden and his long list of lies?
You are an abomination to the field of journalism. You have justified lying to the public in order to protect your partisan goals. You are—were—the fourth estate, that legendary body that is supposed to dive deeply into rumors, stories, and questions—you should be embarrassed and ashamed.
You are supposed to educate us and inform us. You are supposed to assure us that you have turned over every rock and discovered every falsehood perpetuated by those who are supposedly leading our country.
All of them.
You made these points in your editorial:
Trump’s lies don’t just erode American confidence in the presidency, they create a basic mistrust of our political system, whether it’s the elected officials making laws and policies or the millions of federal, state and local workers enacting those laws and policies.
Skepticism of government can be healthy, but Trump is corroding fundamental faith in our institutions by normalizing lies. It may take generations to recover from the damage, if it’s not already too late.
You are a disgrace. I am disgusted by the fact that you are supposed to represent the media and in many ways the events of this country to the entire world. You clearly have no ethos, no conscience, no commitment to guiding us in troubled times. You are the ones who are eroding faith in our media; you are the ones corroding fundamental faith in the media by trying to normalize lies.
You exacerbate the country’s troubles.
And you are the ones who will never recover from your dereliction of duty.
* * * *
(I have been trying to maintain a more positive attitude but have fallen off the wagon.)
Published in Journalism
I look forward to it (:
I don’t think the press is honor bound to be truthful, and at any rate, if society ever tried to hold them accountable in any lasting and meaningful way, determining the truth that they should publish would clog up the courts.
They are, thank goodness, subject to market forces because they are all independent businesses. Keep in mind that we are not being given the news as much as we are being given a marketing pitch. “Keep reading and clicking so our advertisers will pay their bills to us.”
I watched a the press sensationalize the priest scandals in New England twenty years ago. The Boston Globe ultimately won a Pulitzer for its coverage. The paper also started a global witch hunt in which many priests were accused and punished wrongfully. Yes, there was certainly a handful of errant priests in New England, but nowhere near the numbers that the Globe stated. It was truly just a few out of thousands.
Most of their stories were unsubstantiated, but they had real impact on the Church as everyone ran away, afraid of the press. The story ends with Father MacRae (see here and here). This global hysteria was brought about completely by the Boston Globe, and I won’t give them a click or a penny to this day. So many thousands of people were hurt by what they did.
I was thinking one day that if their goal was not to destroy the Catholic Church, the editors would have put these headlines in plain language, dignified 14-point type, included lots of sources that were verifiable, and the stories would have been on page 2 or 3, where they belonged. One bad teacher or doctor or nurse does not tarnish an entire profession.
I have enjoyed immensely watching the New York Times and Boston Globe suffer financially as their market has dwindled further and further each year.
Very good point, @charlotte. Therein lies the problem. They are not interested in being fair, at all.
Accusing a journalist of not being fair is like accusing a quarterback of not scoring home runs.
The issue is not so much the honesty of the press as the unity of the press against truth and in one direction. The enemy is not the press so much as it is the “hive mind” that is being promoted by a monolithic press. Scott Adams has a formulation that if you can get multiple press outlets agreeing on a single fact, then that is the most reliable indicator of the existence of that fact. Assume that the press is unreliable, and biased, etc. This is a good formulation except when the media and tech giants decide that something is true when it isn’t and diverse media reporting isn’t.
We are going to find out in this election how close we are to the hive mind nationally. That is what I will be trying to discern from the November 3 totals. The November 15 totals could well obscure the picture, but even with a failure of media to “call” the election November 3 we should have some indication of the effectiveness of the press in imposing a hive mind.